Food Navigator-USAWhether you're an established brand hiring a top agency to revamp your packaging or a penniless entrepreneur with a blank canvas and a Photoshop license, you should always ask yourself three questions, says design guru Simon Thorneycroft.
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Food Dive Tyson Foods reported record sales in its first-quarter earnings results, according to a company release. Net income increased $1.59 per share, up to $593 million. New income increased 27 percent to $982 million.
Total company sales volume increased 2.4 percent year-over year, to $9.9 billion, with all segments sales volume up from the same time period last year.READ MORE

Global Meat NewsRussia's National Meat Association has claimed that a lifting of the country's food embargo could lead to U.S. pig farmers reinstating supplies to the country, pushing out Brazilian exporters.
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Agri-PulseThe effective date for a new Agriculture Department rule that sets standards of proof for market practices in the livestock and poultry industry has been delayed two months until April 22.
The delay carries out a White House order issued the day President Donald Trump took office to allow for review of rules that were implemented in the final weeks of the Obama administration.READ MORE

USAgNetIn a letter to Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee members, the American Soybean Association and the Soyfoods Association of North America objected to draft legislation that would restrict the marketing of soy milk. The groups claim that the Dairy Pride Act would prohibit the term "milk" from being used with soy milk and soy milk-based products, under the premise that the term "milk" is misleading to consumers.
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Food ProcessingIn May 2016, the Food and Drug Administration announced the Nutrition Facts panel will get a makeover, the agency's first revisions to the Nutritional Labeling and Education Act of 1990 in more than 20 years. Most food and beverage processors will have to comply with the new rules for packaged foods by July 26, 2018. Companies with sales of less than $10 million a year have until 2019. Which means 2017 is the year to get the required label changes, and possibly formulation changes, underway.READ MORE

Washington Monthly Recently in Arkansas, the state House of Representatives passed a bill that would ban the use of federal food stamps to purchase food with "insufficient nutritional value." The sponsor of the bill, State Rep. Mary Bentley, argued that "I want the kids in our state to have sippy cups that are full of good, fresh milk from Arkansas dairies and fruit juice and not Mountain Dew and Pepsi." This justification echoes the narrative of a recent front-page story in the New York Times, provocatively titled "In the Shopping Cart of a Food Stamp Household: Lots of Soda." The claim? That families receiving benefits under the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) spend more money on soft drinks than anything else. Illustrating the article was a photograph of a shopping cart filled with nothing but cases of soda. There was a problem, however, with this tidy narrative. The report on which this article was purportedly based actually found that there are no major differences between the grocery purchases of SNAP households and other consumers.
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Progressiv eGrocerE-commerce leader Amazon.com is contemplating building a two-story, automated grocery store staffed mostly by robots, an inside source told the New York Post.
The store, anticipated to have a larger layout than Amazon's new Amazon Go stores — between 10,000 and 40,000 square feet — would house a full staff of robots on the top floor that would collect and bag products for shoppers on the first floor, according to the newspaper. READ MORE

Food Navigator-USAThe due date for the next farm bill may still be a year away, but stakeholders already are drawing up a laundry list of diverse requests that will require a "big tent approach" at a time when deeply divided political leaders appear unlikely to meet each other part way, industry insiders say.
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Brown University via Phys.orgA new study by two Brown University economists at the Rhode Island Innovative Policy Lab finds that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits increase a household's overall spending on food each month and that an equivalent cash benefit would lead to much smaller increases in food spending.
"For every $100 in SNAP benefits that a household receives, the household spends just over $50 more on food each month," said Jesse Shapiro, an economics professor at Brown who authored the study with his colleague, Justine Hastings.
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